Get more ideas on optimizing your solid-state drive with this simple tool

Tweak-SSD Free is a straightforward application which can provide ideas on how to get more life (or performance) from your system's SSD.

The core of the program is an "SSD optimization wizard", which displays current SSD-related settings and allows you to change them in a click.

Tweak-SSD Free will recommend that you turn off Prefetch and Superfetch, for instance. It points out that the Windows Indexing Service isn't as necessary with fast SSDs, and says turning it off will save lots of needless disk writes. And it recommends turning off boot-time defragmentation for generally the same reasons.

You may not want to follow all the program's suggestions, though. Tweak-SSD would like you to stop Windows from maintaining the "last accessed" date and time for files, for instance, but some may find that genuinely useful.

And we're not entirely sure about the rationale behind every Tweak-SSE recommendation. A couple of options - "Keep system files in memory" and "Use a large system cache" - seem questionable, but because the program doesn't tell you which Registry tweaks these are actually making, it's hard to decide for sure whether they're worth applying.

Tweak-SSD is much like any other tweaking tool, then: some options will work, some are less certain, and you'll need some PC experience to figure out which are best for you.

Please note, the commercial version of the program also includes a TRIM Performance Optimization tool which aims to further improve your drive speed. You can upgrade from within the program for around $14.

What's new in 2.0.1?

- Service release including several minor fixes and improvement

Verdict:

Tweak-SSD's simple wizard offers plenty of options which may help to improve your SSD's life or performance. Some are much better than others, though, so it helps if you've the Windows knowledge and experience to pick out the winners from the rest.

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."

8.48 brings:
- Optimized grass rendering and procedural foliage system preview
- Plugins available in Marketplace
- Improved accuracy for motion blur
- New Tone Mapper
- Support for all the latest VR hardware including Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Steam VR and HTC Vive, Leap Motion, and Sony's Project Morpheus for PlayStation 4
- "Scrubbable" network replays with rewind support and live time scrubbing
- Visualize the memory footprint of game assets in an interactive tree map UI